Prepped and ready
Prepped and ready
Prepped and ready for install
Spent some time getting the engine ready to go into the car this weekend. I started with bolting the trans up to the motor, so that I could crank the engine over on the starter to prime the oil system. I did it without the cams installed first, cranked it for about 30-45 seconds before it finally got oil up to the head. Then I installed the cams and the timing belt so that I could crank it over till it got actual oil pressure. With that done, I moved on to installing the little odd and ends, like the water inlet tube, alternator bracket/alternator. Came up with a gasket for the intake (oddball bolt pattern that doesn’t match the head or the intake quite right). Tapped a couple of the unused holes in the intake so I can install pipe plugs in them, before I installed the intake for the last time. But generally, just a whole lot of minor things.
You may have noticed that transmission has a large number of wires coming from it. I barely mentioned it a couple posts back.. That is a Chrysler “41te”, an electronically controlled 4 speed automatic transmission.
Sunday, May 30, 2010
This is a very unique piece. It’s the intermediate shaft from a Mexican turbo Dodge Stratus (Chrysler Sebring actually, but same deal). It will allow me to use the same axle on both sides of the car, which is a good thing. This transmission doesn’t use a normal Omni axle on the passenger side, because it doesn’t have the “extension housing” that normal TD transmissions have.
The trans mount. First problem I had was I don’t have one for an automatic anymore. When I converted the Omni to 5 speed a couple years back, I tossed the mount along with the trans. Best I could find at the JY was one from a K car. Combined with the bolt pattern being slightly different on this trans, and quite possibly putting the mount in a different location as well, I finally just used the old 5 speed and it’s mount to modify this K car auto mount into something that’ll probably do the job.
Above on the left is what the mount looked like before (though I had already started slicing into it), and on the right is about where it needed to end up. I cut it in half, cut about an inch out of the height, and flipped it around backwards and moved it about an inch inboard.
Hopefully, the bottom half won’t run into the frame of the car.
So yeah, I’m still at the bottom of the learning curve for learning how to weld. Spray painting over it really made it look better, but still leaves a lot to be desired.. I’m Mig welding with flux core wire. It’s a huge step up from the Arc welder I had been using. :)
You can see the notched bolt holes, that’s what I had to do to get the bolt holes to line up.
On the left, you can see that I did a small amount of reinforcing the now seriously weakened design.
There it is, done and installed. I thought about putting a bit of reinforcement on this side like I did on the other side, but I want to make sure it fits in the car as is, first.
Hopefully, my next post will be me installing this into the car.